Honey and the Mason Jar Sieve

A colony dies in N. California

A colony of my bees didn't make it this winter, so I've begun pulling out the honey they made. 

Why did the bees die?

A number of factors, not the least of which we had a lot of rain in late November and December with chilly temperatures. 

Bees need to get out and fly every couple of days to purge themselves, but they can only do that if the temperature rises above 50 degrees.  Then too, these colonies were somewhat weak going into the fall.  They had two "brood supers" (the big boxes where the queen lays her eggs) of stored honey, but they ended up eating out some of the frames and getting into a frame corner, and they didn't have enough heat to stay warm.  So they starved themselves and then got too cold.  Sad! But that's what happened.  I found the queen and a small circle of attending bees surrounding her, dead in a corner of a frame.

Queen and attending bees had food. But they were just too cold.

So, anyway, a few dead bees and a lot of unused honey. What to do?

 Pulling honey without an extractor

I don't own a honey extractor - the one I had back in Indiana was auctioned off when I left there 30 years ago.  It was the old six frame extractor that I picked up at an auction, and I had never used it.  It was made out of galvanized steel anyway, so it was no big loss.
 
So I've been pulling honey for a couple of years now without an extractor, one frame at a time.  Here's what I use:

Bill of Materials

• Plastic foundation in all the hive frames.
• Very large stainless steel bowl.
• Large stainless cooking spoon.
• Rubber (or sometimes wooden) spatula.
• Four empty wide-mouth quart mason jars.
• Six wide-mouth mason jar rings.
• Four lids.
• A bit of new, fiberglass window screen.
• Scissors.
• Duct-tape.
• Plastic straws

Simple Mason Jar Sieve for straining honey from comb

Here's what I do:

1. The plastic foundation allows me to scrape out the honey and wax - down to the foundation - without re-wiring the frames each year. The bees will rebuild the comb as they bring in new nectar. (Not very efficient for the bees, but they're cheap labor.)
2. Normally I pull out one frame at a time from the colony, brushing off any bees, and bring it into the house.
3. Scrape the honey and wax into the large stainless bowl using a stainless spoon until I have cleaned the frame down.  I use the rubber spatula to get as much honey off the frame as possible, and then rise the excess off with hot water.  Then I return the frame back to the colony. (In the current situation, back to the empty super.)
4. I chop up the honey comb as much as possible with the spoon, and then ladle the mess into two quart-sized mason jars.  One deep frame of honey with wax seems to just fill two quart jars, but sometimes it goes to three.
5. I take two mason jar rings and duct-taped them "top-to-top" so I have a single band that can hold two jars, mouth-to-mouth.
6. A piece of fiberglass window screen is traced with the mason jar lid. I cut the screen in a circle that fits exactly inside of one of the duct-taped rings.
7. I put the taped rings (with the screen) onto the jar containing the honey comb so that the screen is honey-side in the ring.
8. I insert an empty mason jar into the top of the ring and then turn the whole thing upside down.

The honey drizzles down into the empty mason jar and that's about it.

The only problem with this technique is that as the honey drizzles down, it creates a suction in the top mason jar.  Placing the jars at an angle will allow the air in the bottom mason jar to move as a bubble to the top of the top jar.  This gets things going pretty well: I use the cleaned up stainless bowl for this purpose to act as a stand.  Two jars, bottom-to-bottom leaning against the rim of the bowl. It's a little wobbly with just two jars in it, but it works okay. If I'm doing two frames at a time, it's a little tricky, but as I said, it's a big stainless bowl.

Still, eventually I'll end up with a wax/honey plug that is against the screen that slows the drizzle.  So, if the mixture is really thick, I'll open the top jar and push and "smoosh" the wax along the inside glass with the spoon, and then insert a straw behind the screen - reaching to the top of the top jar containing the honey and wax combo. The straw then allows enough air to seep into the top jar and keep the mixture draining.

The process takes a couple of days, and I keep fiddling with it until all the honey is out of the comb. This is a work in progress, and I am still working on the details of the easiest way to set this whole rig going.

When I figure I've got as much honey out of the wax as I can, I simply disassemble the filled jar, put a lid on it with a new ring, and put it into the pantry.

I run hot water into the remaining jar with the screen and the wax - washing the wax until it's sort of granulated.  When the wax no longer has any honey on it I dry the wax between paper towels, and then put it into a plastic bag for a later time when I have enough to melt down in a homemade solar extractor.

The entire process, as I said, takes a couple of days, but the amount of time I'm actually working is usually pretty small - maybe 15-20 minutes per frame if I'm focused. Clean up is easy, as everything goes into the dishwasher - including the screen circles which I reuse. 

This obviously isn't the most time-productive way to pull a lot of honey, but since I normally only take a single frame or two at a time, it's appropriate for the normal amount of honey that we use. A quart jar filled with honey is about 3 lbs. It's certainly less expensive than buying an extractor, or the mess of setting one up, extracting, and then cleaning up that contraption afterwards.

Now, however, I've got a lot of frames with honey, so we'll see what I end up doing.

Thanks bees!  Sorry you didn't make it this year.  Next year - if we continue with this kind of weather - I'll probably insulate the hive boxes. 

One more note:  Last summer I took a colony from a tree that had been working wild mustard in the vineyards.  Wow! Amazing honey. The stuff was almost pure white, and was like eating candy.

The only problem was that the wild mustard nectar was mostly composed of dextrose sugar.  The result? 

Dextrose crystallizes easily, so I had a lot of crystallized honey in the comb itself.  So I had to heat the mason jars filled with wax and crystallized honey in a water bath before I could run it in the sieve.  A little more work, but the results were good.  A couple days later the dextrose honey was again crystallizing in their jars.